Peter Norvig, now CTO of Google, agrees with you. Coding, like writing, is best improved by an alternating diet of writing and reading good works. He collected a few of the best he'd found in a book called Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, available from his web site or from Amazon: http://norvig.com/paip.html

It talks about AI because it was the 80s (92 by the time it hit shelves) and AI was cool---but the applications involved are now just what we call computing. It's not perfect: fifteen years have passed since it was written. In that time, C++'s STL and Boost have caught up with many features of Common Lisp. Java's come along and done well. Other interactive dynamic languages than Lisp exist: Python, for example. So you'll have to do some translating in your head---but for the same reason that Cicero is read by students of English rhetoric, Norvig should be read by C++ and Java programmers seeking mastery.